Your mood doesn't really matter. Some of the best creative work gets done on the days when you feel that everything you're doing is just plain junk.

Next to Morning Pages and Artist Dates, the most potent tool for contacting inner guidance and creativity is walking.

People frequently believe the creative life is grounded in fantasy. The more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in the particular, the focused, the well observed or specifically imagined.

Progress, not perfection, is what we should be asking of ourselves.

Pivotal to a happy writing life is a practice of daily personal writing.

We don't always know what makes us happy. We know, instead, what we think SHOULD. We are baffled and confused when our attempts at happiness fail...We are mute when it comes to naming accurately our own preferences, delights, gifts, talents. The voice of our original self is often muffled, overwhelmed, even strangled, by the voices of other people's expectations. The tongue of the original self is the language of the heart.

It hurts like hell when the world won't invest in you. But it's excruciating, almost more than you can bear, when you don't believe and invest in yourself.